JOHN Brayford say that it’s coming to crunch time for the Brewers in the fight for Championship survival.

The defender took the captain’s armband in the 3-2 defeat at Aston Villa, where the Brewers put in a much-improved performance.

He said: “We have to get it right where we all do our jobs every single game as it’s crunch time now with how many games that are left. We have to stand up and be counted. We can’t revert back to poor performances we have to retain a standard and have that belief and bit of grit to get through to the end.

“The teams around us are a lot bigger than us but I know what we have got in our dressing room and I would back our lads ten times out of ten.

“Aston Villa is the standard we need to achieve every game until the end of the season. That was a stepping stone and there’s a lot more games to go and I don’t want to be sitting here in another month saying we have gone back to indifferent performances. We have to keep a standard that will keep us in this league.

“People wrote us off all last season and this season and to stay up last year we had to have belief and having that will stand us in good stead for the rest of the season. We knew we were going to have a battle all the way through the season, so we still have the mindset that we can get out of it. If we put good performances together we still have a chance of doing that.”